Glamour in Reverse
Bus STOP. (Canton.)
'I WONDER when Marilyn Monroe's cominl on,' whispered my companion, an innocen abroad in the film world who had somehml managed to remain unfamiliar with those no' familiar features, about a third of the wal through Bus Stop. I murmured that there, It fact, she was and had been for the past twent! minutes. 'What, in those clothes?' hissed rill companion, aghast, for anything farther frog the legend of glamour would be hard t( imagine. Out of a jumble of feathers, sequins and bits of tatty satin appeared what Beater has called Miss Monroe's Greuze-like feature! —starry, in the sense of glowing, and innocent and childlike, but not in the Hollywood sense at all: it was glamour in reverse. The heroine a hill-billy pin-up saving her bus fare to Holly' wood by working in a cowboys' rowdy saloon. in Arizona as a 'chanteuse' eshantoctse--that' French,' she explains) called Cherie ('that,! French, too'), meets a rip-roaring, uninhibite( young cowboy who has never, in his twenty' one years in the wilds of Montana, spoken IC a girl, but on the advice of his old friend and guardian is looking out for a wife while attend' ing the annual rodeo. One look at Cherie in bet spangles and the cowboy falls in love, and then convinced that women and cattle are much ol a muchness when it comes to taming, he pun' sues her round Phoenix, Arizona, with whooPs„ yells, and at last a lassoo, and carries her on to the Susie-Q ranch on a bus. The ending, the weakest part of story, acting and direction, !s. fairly foreseeable, and it is only in this last big scene at the roadside bus stop, when the Pas' sengers arrange their various intersecting des' tinies, that the film's theatrical skeleton shows through : till then the change from stage to film has been neatly and 'efficiently carried out. A certain see-saw emotional quality distracts one here and there, for the director, Joshua Logan (he who made Picnic), does not seem to have decided quite where, or how far, to play it for farce, satire or sentiment, and where to play for laughter, and where for tears. But thls does not seem to affect Miss Monroe, whose performance as the dumbest of provincial blondes, the most soft-hearted, as well as simple-minded, of sleazy glamour girls, 15 touching and riotously funny at exactly the same moments.
ISABEL (MOLY
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